Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

The site's mysterious admins begin the next chapter of online Whac-A-Mole.

As of Monday, well-known BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is back online. Three months ago, the tenacious tracker was chased out of its Ukrainian host, likely under pressure from American authorities. It may also have been driven offline due to a denial of service attack.

According to the IP address linked to the tracker, the new host appears to be physically located in Hong Kong. The website, meanwhile, remains down.

TorrentFreak points out that in previous closures, Demonoid's tracker appeared before its website came back online, indicating that the site's return may be coming soon.

“In 2007 and 2009 Demonoid suffered similar downtime episodes and at the time the tracker reappeared several weeks before the site,” TorrentFreak wrote.

As we noted previously, the United States Trade Representative mentioned Demonoid by name (PDF) on its Notorious Markets List in a government report dated December 2011. That report also noted that the site’s administrator had been arrested “recently” on the authority of the Mexican attorney general—the admin has reportedly been operating out of Mexico.

Demonoid was the first torrent site I visited, before even TPB. It will eventually, one day, probably, disappear forever, but along with Audiogalaxy, Napster and Kazaa it'll be one of those things that will probably never be forgotten

Welcome back demonoid! There are bigger and better torrent sites out there but demonoid was the first one that I found that was fastish, regularly had what I was looking for and wasn't riddled with virii. glad to see them back! Screw the MAFIAA!

The whole file sharing thing has been a fun bit of theater. Pirate Bay goes down, Pirate Bay returns. Megaupload goes down, Dotcom schools the US then sets out to bring Mega back stronger than ever. Demonoid goes dark, comes back, goes dark again, and now the tracker is back (which was a precursor to the actual website coming back before).

How much money has been spent doing a whole lot of nothing but giving more publicity to file sharing, shaping public opinion towards being more accepting of file sharing, and making martyrs of people like the UK teen the US is trying to deport for running a link farm of TV shows (no hosting even)?

Welcome back demonoid! There are bigger and better torrent sites out there but demonoid was the first one that I found that was fastish, regularly had what I was looking for and wasn't riddled with virii. glad to see them back! Screw the MAFIAA!

There are? I never really found anything better than it. Then again, once I found it I did not search further.

So the fat bitch herself is back, well that's good news. I missed the tracker for finding garbage torrents, aka non-mainstream, low seeded, older stuff that's not actively enforced against. Why should Demonoid not get a pass for garbage torrents anyway? Those aren't under the world government suppression regime. They're only interested in movies and Metallica music anyway. I figure, as long as Demon provides a useful public service, in finding rare files, the copynazis should just eff off and leave it alone.

Best i can tell, Demonoid has operated with two trackers. One public (inferno) and one private.

I suspect that while the site and the public tracker has been down for a while, the private one has been operating in the background and sometimes the files shared there has made their way onto other public trackers.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore, 1993

That quote was made way back when technology didn't exist to inspect individual packets and route/block them on a large scale. China, Iran and several other countries would certainly be doing a good job at challenging the assumptions made in said quote.

Yeah. Demonoid is a notorious place for some to go to find a great vinyl rip of CDs or poor-quality records they already own.

Everyone with a sliver of ethical and moral aptitude should know that you are to track down those out-of-print UK and Japanese first pressings of Iron Maiden's first seven LPs on eBay and hope to their gods they aren't warped. We can all find perfect copies of the vinyl we like and digitize them with our $6,000 VPI turntables and our $2,000 cartridges.

Seriously though: shutting down sites like Demonoid isn't going to stop anyone from not paying for music or getting a quick MP3 copy of the latest Taylor Swift album.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore, 1993

That quote was made way back when technology didn't exist to inspect individual packets and route/block them on a large scale. China, Iran and several other countries would certainly be doing a good job at challenging the assumptions made in said quote.

Are you factoring in the routes around it that people use? TOR, VPN, Proxies, etc.. People in these countries DO find ways around it, and it's slowly becoming a larger problem. In China, the people are getting more and more skeptical of the claims that the government makes, more annoyed with the censorship, and starting to fight against this. I think the 'routes around it' part is just slower moving, but is indeed happening.

To be fair, Hollywood IS trying to compete with at least some variety of legal methods - Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Google Play, etc. The problem is that if you want something that's not available at all via the legal methods (not even necessarily obscure stuff, just anything not on their catalogs for whatever reason), torrents and file sharing sites/services are likely to be able to service your needs when the legal avenues won't. Also, for those of us who run media centers and enjoy having our own collection of stored media files, a lot of the legal avenues don't help because you either have the option of streaming (which kinda makes collections impossible) or downloading a DRM-laden file that won't work anywhere but the device you downloaded it to, which is a waste of money.

Hollywood is big on control - their control. I don't seem them ever competing in the terms I suspect you're suggesting as it would mean them giving up control over their content in ways they would prefer not to have to deal with. It's easier for them to just press on their politician buddies to pass laws that prop up their industry.

Are you factoring in the routes around it that people use? TOR, VPN, Proxies, etc.. People in these countries DO find ways around it, and it's slowly becoming a larger problem. In China, the people are getting more and more skeptical of the claims that the government makes, more annoyed with the censorship, and starting to fight against this. I think the 'routes around it' part is just slower moving, but is indeed happening.

In China's case, they can always outlaw the use of these technologies to bypass the firewall. You might not be able to monitor the content someone is using viaa SSH/VPN/onion router/proxy, but if you can detect such things you can still enact punishments once they're criminalized. Though if they go THAT far it might cause various foreign companies to pull out of China if they can't do business securely any longer (I hope anyway).

To be fair, Hollywood IS trying to compete with at least some variety of legal methods - Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Google Play, etc.

I don't believe so. As far as I can tell, Hollywood has been throwing everything it can at these services from trying to compete. It is more of a testament to companies that are desperately trying to navigate a gauntlet of copyright nazis and serving a demand.

Demonoid was one of the cleanest, strait forward, easy to use, great quality, go to private tracker on the net. It was well maintained, not counting the downtime due to misc issues it experienced all the time. You could find torrents on Demonoid that couldn't be found at most other sites, especially when it came to old stuff. The most important part of Demonoid was the amount of people that seeded vs leeched at any given time. Have to remove the Demonoid tracker from the list while downloading most things so as to not kill your ratio, always try to keep a 1.5+.

I remember Demonoid having consistently good selection and quality back in the days before Netflix, Hulu, and the like all happened. IIRC they had weird membership requirements on their website, but the tracker was open to all. I'm not surprised that a site with such good curation would be administered by a very small group of people, like Oink was.

It seems a bit peculiar that Demonoid operates a tracker, rather than using magnet links like The Pirate Bay. I suppose the trade-off for having a centralized point of failure is the ability to curate content and enforce upload ratios. Am I right?

I haven't really had a reason to use BitTorrent in years, though. I guess I don't mind paying going to the movie theater or ordering things on Amazon now that I'm not in high school anymore. I can understand folks with esoteric taste or in smaller international markets still having to rely on BitTorrent, though. I wonder what portion of Demonoid users are in the US, and how that number has changed over the years.

More importantly, everyone knows that using BitTorrent in the US is a great way to sued by a copyright troll. Don't people use things like MegaUpload, instead, now?

...There are bigger and better torrent sites out there but demonoid was the first one that I found that was fastish, regularly had what I was looking for and wasn't riddled with virii...

Those "direct download" links they introduced near the end linked to .exes tho'. I'm sure they weren't viruses, but they were still bound to install something profoundly unwanted. Those links made me suddenly like the site a whole lot less.

Still, I do get your point: Public enough to have gigantic amounts of stuff, private enough not to be completely sketchy.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore, 1993

That quote was made way back when technology didn't exist to inspect individual packets and route/block them on a large scale. China, Iran and several other countries would certainly be doing a good job at challenging the assumptions made in said quote.

WallNut wrote:

delebre wrote:

Are you factoring in the routes around it that people use? TOR, VPN, Proxies, etc.. People in these countries DO find ways around it, and it's slowly becoming a larger problem. In China, the people are getting more and more skeptical of the claims that the government makes, more annoyed with the censorship, and starting to fight against this. I think the 'routes around it' part is just slower moving, but is indeed happening.

In China's case, they can always outlaw the use of these technologies to bypass the firewall. You might not be able to monitor the content someone is using viaa SSH/VPN/onion router/proxy, but if you can detect such things you can still enact punishments once they're criminalized. Though if they go THAT far it might cause various foreign companies to pull out of China if they can't do business securely any longer (I hope anyway).

still? I actually thought you were trying to be sarcastic at first, if anything all you did was prove the point. the joke here is they can't criminalise non "treasonous" communication or the pursuit of information, else face a backlash of human rights. so all their regulation is based on physically blocking in/out bound traffic at the gateways, whacking state side moles of distribution, and pouting at any foreign commerce that doesn't submit to their will. and the further industrialised they get, the harder this is going to be to pull off without impeding traffic they deem "legitimate" so, this wall is likely to be coming down within our lifetimes, much like Berlin... either that or just keep leaking like the sieve it is.

Welcome back demonoid! There are bigger and better torrent sites out there but demonoid was the first one that I found that was fastish, regularly had what I was looking for and wasn't riddled with virii. glad to see them back! Screw the MAFIAA!

There are? I never really found anything better than it. Then again, once I found it I did not search further.

Yeah, once you start getting into the private torrent sites, none of the public ones really cut it

I had a clash with one of the demonoid moderators which put into perspective that these guys that run torrent sites are not modern day Robin Hoods. More like they are drunk on the little bit of notoriety that torrents bring them.

The issue was that some guy had posted an issue of a comic that had already been posted in some other 0 day collection. I had been looking for that comic all week. It didn't show up in any search, previous issues of the comic had been posted separately without problem. This little fascist admin deleted it as a duplicate despite it being almost impossible to find.

I thought private sites like Demonoid were meant to be some sort of community where people helped each other to find stuff of interest. In reality they are all more concerned about their ratios.

There was no ratio requirement, they even stated that...well, at least not for the last ~6 years.

edit: though now that i think of what you wrote, perhaps you mean the people who deleted the stuff wanted to have THEIR ratios higher, therefor deleting "competing" files or files that they thought were.

I had a clash with one of the demonoid moderators which put into perspective that these guys that run torrent sites are not modern day Robin Hoods. More like they are drunk on the little bit of notoriety that torrents bring them.

The issue was that some guy had posted an issue of a comic that had already been posted in some other 0 day collection. I had been looking for that comic all week. It didn't show up in any search, previous issues of the comic had been posted separately without problem. This little fascist admin deleted it as a duplicate despite it being almost impossible to find.

I thought private sites like Demonoid were meant to be some sort of community where people helped each other to find stuff of interest. In reality they are all more concerned about their ratios.

There're some good ones, and some bad.

A lot of the confusion about the status of Demonoid is the same as back in 07 when the same sort of thing happened, just with Canada in place of Ukraine.

TF broke the story, but because the site staff/irc ops didn't know about it, they denied it. They went all out saying 'TF makes stuff up' and creating ranting posts about it. Then a month or two later, turns out TF was 100% right. Those same people said 'I guess TF got lucky'.

They think that they're high up in the grand scheme of things. The guys that own demonoid don't tell the day-to-day staff anything though. They know nothing about the ins-and-outs, and the actual situation. BUT, most can't admit that they're completely out of the loop, so they make up stories about DDOS, or 'it's being worked on' and 'you're making stuff up'. All because they *know* that they're important enough to be told if something happened,

The TPB staff, by contrast, don't have any worries about saying 'I don't know' or the like.

stragen001 wrote:

Yeah, once you start getting into the private torrent sites, none of the public ones really cut it

Nothing quite like artificial scarcity.In my experience, 99% of "private" trackers are run by morons. They don't know much about the Bittorrent protocol, or clients. Like the ones that INSIST you can't use any µTorrent newer than 1.6.1, because Bittorrent Inc. made every one after that, and has it phone home, tracking you, so you need to use the last one made by Ludde. Except 1.6.1 was the first Bittorrent inc. version.Or how many tell you 'you must disable DHT in the client', otherwise it'll 'leak'. Except no client I've tested has done so. Heck, they're still claiming Bitcomet does, when only 0.60 did under very strict circumstances, SEVEN YEARS AGO.

And I won't go on any more about how those 'private' trackers are actually, from the perspective of a antiP2P company, a goldmine. You've got a small pool of recurring peers, who have supplied identifying information (membership credentials - email, username, etc. Very handy, just ask "terrastar" aka Jammie Thomas), who often donate money, and all on a site which actively tracks and stores their activity!Very safe...

Personally, I have recently been using Youtube and Riptiger to service all my movie needs. At the moment I have focused on finding Vietnamese and Thai movies and next on my list will be Russian films. You can find lots without even really trying, and quite a lot of Hollywood productions as well. I watched a 720p version of Tekken just for the hell of it a couple of days ago .

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore, 1993

That quote was made way back when technology didn't exist to inspect individual packets and route/block them on a large scale. China, Iran and several other countries would certainly be doing a good job at challenging the assumptions made in said quote.

China, Iran and other countries that have a very strict, on-the-surface, political-based restriction/censorship also have a very lucrative black market under-the-table providing work-arounds and services to people. And, not ironically, the politicians that control the censorship are also being paid by the black market operators to keep the restrictions up in order to maintain that lucrative business model.

It's a win-win for both the politicians and the underworld element. The underworld element makes a nice profit, the politicans get a nice bribe, and if anyone pisses off the underworld or politicians, the politicians can get evidence from the underworld crowd of that person's wrong-doings and pressure that individual into doing whatever it is they want or go to jail.